Four Tests to Check if You're Not Ready to Be on Snapchat

Snapchat's the latest and greatest social media platform among teens and young adults, and schools everywhere know it. Many are beginning to incorporate Snapchat in their social media strategies alongside stalwarts like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in an effort to better reach current and prospective students and drive up engagement.

If you haven't considered it yet, now's a great time to utilize Snapchat at your school — so long as you're ready for it. Inside Higher Ed provides some great insights into how to tell if you have the foundation in place for a successful Snapchat strategy, or if your plan needs more work.

1. Your website isn’t responsive and enrollment focused

Your institutional website is a deal breaker. If you don’t have a top-notch website that is responsive and built to help you recruit students, then you don’t need to be on Snapchat. You need to find a way to pour some resources into your website first.

2. You haven’t thought about the content on your department pages

If your academic department landing pages are boring, laced with long pieces of text, hard to find, and generally not laid out well for the web, Snapchat should not be your priority. Commit the time to put your academic department webpages on a rotation to be looked at and updated. During key yield times for prospective students, these pages are critically important.

3. You need a content strategy

If you don’t have a strategy that drives what content you are producing, for what audience, combined with what timing makes the most sense and how to connect the visual assets then don’t even think about Snapchat. Find a way to learn about content strategy and build a plan and a team that can execute it.

4. You don’t have a plan for Facebook and Instagram

If Facebook and Instagram are not significant parts of your digital marketing strategy then Snapchat is not the answer. These two social media platforms are more established and provide better analytics and a better return than any other platform that we have experimented with at Gettysburg to date.

Dean Asher is a former copywriter with MBS. Though he no longer writes for us, he is still proud of having helped this blog continue to evolve as an industry-leading resource of news and original content.